d00dism

Our lawmakers are hard at work. This time the pressing issue is extension of daylight savings time. The current plan is to extend it by a month total, three weeks in Spring and a week in the Fall. The goal of this legislation is to reduce oil consumption.

I’m no fan of daylight savings. It just means more work for me to change all my clocks. I’d be more in favor of dropping it entirely and picking one damn time scheme. After all, if extending it will save on oil consumption, shouldn’t moving to that time scheme permanently save us even more?

Reps. Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts, and Fred Upton, R-Michigan, must think there is substantial savings to be had. They originally wanted to extend by a whole month on both ends. They must have something to back up that claim. There must be some compelling reason to do this despite concerns about effects on livestock and international flight scheduling (as well as requiring new programming for computers).

Well, if you thought that like I did, you were wrong.

Senate negotiators accepted the new version, along with a call for a study on how much daylight-saving time actually affects oil consumption.

Wait, wait, wait. They haven’t even done a study on how much the move would actually save? Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse, just a little bit? I would think that careful analysis of the pros and cons of a piece of legislation would be the first step before introducing it. I guess I was wrong.

Besides, who needs studies when you have reason like:

“The beauty of daylight-saving time is that it just makes everyone feel sunnier,” said Markey.

and:

Upton noted that the extension means daylight-saving time will continue through Halloween, adding to safety. “Kids across the nation will soon rejoice,” said Upton, because they’ll have another hour of daylight trick-or-treating.

Just thinking about it makes me feel “sunnier”. How about you?

Update: I didn’t even realize how fucked up Indiana is.

Some time ago, I used Feedburner to make a new feed for the site. I called it the Superfeed and used their service to add in Flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks. However, I found it way too limiting. There were other sources I wanted to add, such as my Netflix notifications and my Ta-da List. While I used it though, I became addicted to their statistics. I could instantly gauge how many people were reading.

The problem was that many people probably weren’t using the Superfeed. I used the stock RSS feed as the official one for a long time and despite making the Superfeed the default (and then switching in another Feedburner feed that was just the blog), I imagine many were still using the old feed (meaning my count was wildly inaccurate). To make matters worse Safari would choose the Atom feed no matter what. I started to cobble a solution together by adding an Atom version of the feed. That wasn’t a complete solution.

I was so relieved to discover a Wordpress plugin that would redirect all feeds to your Feedburner feed. It required a little tweaking (there’s a bug if the Wordpress installation is in another location), but it seems to have successfully redirected most everyone. I’m not sure about Bloglines as it still says I’m using the old feed (which suggests that Bloglines doesn’t obey 302 permanent redirects correctly; I guess you can’t win them all). Anyway, today’s count is up around 40, a pretty respectable number in my book. I may have to put one of those little chiclets on the main page to brag.

I realized today that between a real lack of Apple/Mac news and having lots to do (relating to the mysterious piece of news I referred to in our last exciting episode) that I likely wouldn’t be posting much, though the supplemental is going to get regular updates.

The good news is that once I get back into the groove, I’ll be adding a lot of content that is in a vein that this site hasn’t explored before. Stay tuned.

Those of you that I talk to daily already know why I’m ordering a new D-Link DCM-202. Please don’t mention it in the comments. I’m going to be all superstitious about it and write a big post about it later.

Anyway, at about $40 with mail-in rebate at Amazon with DOCSIS 2.0, this was the modem to get. I won’t be posting a review for a while, but I’ll do all kinds of testing when I do. I’ll use Skype, Gizmo, Vonage (as I’ll likely be getting that too), Bittorrent, and so on. There won’t be anything too formal (as switching between a couple cable modems isn’t really an option, nor something I want to do), but I will be able to definitively say whether I think it sucks.

Apple released the iPhoto 5.0.3 update yesterday. Normally, iApp updates aren’t particularly exciting. In fact, the details are excruciatingly boring.

Here are the changes according to Apple:

• On Tiger, images are no longer color-shifted after editing (Mac OS X 10.4.2 update required)
• Book layouts will not change when moving an image on a page
• An issue was addressed that caused some book orders to be cancelled
• Smart Albums will display correctly in other iLife applications

Normally, I’d ignore this and just install it, but the first bullet is the interesting one. It fixes a problem that has rather profound effects. Generally, it’s referred to as the iPhoto color shifting bug. The linked article is probably the best documentation of the bug I’ve seen (complete with animation). At any rate, it means I can start editing photos again.